Finland: The early stage nation in need of late stage money(thenordicweb.com) |
Finland: The early stage nation in need of late stage money(thenordicweb.com) |
Finland early-stage money is mostly government money.
So mostly "I am an unemployed Nokia ex-manager, here is my form, please give me 1M euros"
This is probably the WORST group to start startups, but the easy initial financing will mask this (possibly for years).
Worse, artificial traction will crowd out the true outliers which deserve funding.
Late stage money will have a ton of leads, and will completely squeeze out the founders.
Leading (eventually) to large-ish but zombie-like companies which will retain talent but not grow.
Contrast this with seed funding in the US (and Israel which the article mentions positively) :
i am a technical developer who hates bureaucracy - give me some ramen money
TEKES and Sitra both evaluate everything they put money into. That evaluation is more likely to be aligned with political climate than business prospects. (There is hardly any difference with big business, but big difference with small ones. Sort of "Nobody got fired buying IBM" -effect is at play. Currently shown in the "strategic areas" in TEKES funding. Which happen to be local current tech hype words.)
The Social security office hands out "Start money" which amounts ~1000e/month to starting business, given that you employ yourself and the accept your application. No slow bootstrapping allowed.
Practically these programs don't enable anybody to start a business. You can't plan on getting anything form govermnet, because they might always just fail your application for whatever reason. Which means your businessplan has to work wihtout goverment assistance for you to start it. If you then get assistance, that's just lucky, but unfair advantage. Especially the "start money" seems completely wasted.
The Finnish goverment budget has deficit, but their revenue is huge and credit rating still very good. The smart way IMO would be a government loan guarantee to every business. Let's say SBA style, 75% of total summ guaranteed up to 100 000 thousand. That's peanuts to big companies, but would help immensely any startup. No government evaluation needed, as the lender would retain some risk. Gov would actually spend little money while doing a lot. Win-win, but seems like no politician allows ceding power from government institutions to markets.
>The government’s investment arm Tekes is behind almost every Finnish startup.
Local Finnish private investors are less than thrilled by startups completely hand picked by government office? Color me suprized.